Army Of Two

Bullet dinging armour plating and fearsome face masks…two gung ho stereotypes with big guns and attitudes the size of Texas. Their mission—to kill everything else that moves, their motives—money, money, and sometimes a favour for an old friend. Army of Two is a whole ammo belt full of violent, tactical fun. You play as either of the two protagonists Salem and Rios, two highly trained mercenaries for hire, who fight terror, for cash, some of which will be used to buy bigger guns.

Although the story has its own share of twists, its nothing in the way of path breaking, so you better forget about the subject matter of the game and focus on the way it plays instead. Game mechanics are good, if a little unbalanced. While your weapon recoil and the slightly screwy aiming system will ensure that you’re highly inaccurate (at best)—especially while moving around—your enemies can hit you accurately from a hundred metres away. They’ll duck frequently too, and use flush out tactics like flanking and even lob the odd grenade at you. For your tactics, Army of Two employs a system called aggro found in a few MMORPG games, where enemies focus on the person doing the most damage and ignore the other person totally. Suppose you put your partner in aggro mode, he will draw all the fire, leaving you to flank the enemy virtually unseen and pop ‘em off rather easily. You can also draw aggro, leaving your partner to move around undetected and the system works rather well here. There’s also an overkill mode that’s activated if one of you draw sufficient amounts of aggro—everything moves in slow motion, the aggressive one gets double damage, and the other one becomes invisible for the entire duration of the overkill mode—which is fourteen seconds.

One of the highlights for me was the weapon purchase system—I love guns—and from the Desert Eagle to the Dragunov SVD to the M134 Gatling gun, you can buy them all…the only shortage being cash. Weapons sound ultra-real too, and you get to mod your weapons, adding silencers, bigger barrels, larger magazines, etc. Such mods alter statistics like accuracy, damage, ammunition, and aggro. There’s also a gold plated “pimped” upgrade to each weapon that increases your aggro and little else—the man with the golden gun, anyone?

I’ll admit that the storyline screws up on the execution of some good subject matter, but the intense action, good use of tactics, brilliant weapons and great co-op mode make this game a good way to spend half a day.